Tag Archives: sexuality

“If He Doesn’t Hit You, He Doesn’t Love You.” So runs an African proverb. Or a Russian proverb, according to other sources. Or a Bolivian proverb, according to still others. Perhaps it is all three. A similar Latin American saying, “The more you hit me, the more I love you,” turns up over 100,000 hits on Google.

It is hardly a new idea that female sexuality has a masochistic component. Read more …

Last night I was so bored I actually turned on Fox News. I do this now and then, with the same sort of feeling I get when I pass a roadside accident and, against my better judgment, turn briefly to glimpse the carnage. It was around 10:30, so the execrable Sean Hannity was on. After a minute or so of the usual Obamacare coverage they went to a commercial. It was then that I received the revelation, and my life changed forever.

I want to recommend the latest publication by our own James O’Meara: a Kindle “Single.” Kindle Singles are basically long essays or short books. In this case, it is a review essay of more than 16,000 words (“a monster!”) on James Neill’s The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies. Read more …

Giorgio Aurispa had not forgotten a single episode of his first religious pilgrimage towards the Ideal Theatre; he could recall every instant of his extraordinary emotion in that hour when he had first seen on the fair hillside, at the further extremity of a long leafy avenue, the building dedicated to the supreme festival of Art; he could reconstruct the amphitheater in its solemn vastness, girdled by columns and arches, the mystery of the Mystical Gulf. Read more …

D. H. Lawrence argues that through the sex act, individuals participate in some kind of mysterious power running through nature. But does this momentary experience have any kind of long-term effect on them? Lawrence directly addresses this question. When the sex act is over, he writes, “The two individuals are separate again. But are they as they were before? Is the air the same after a thunderstorm as before? No. The air is as it were new, fresh, tingling with newness. Read more …

D. H. Lawrence is best known to the general public as a writer of sexy books. In his own time, his treatment of sex made him notorious and caused him to run afoul of the authorities on a number of occasions. I have no desire to rehearse in detail the well-known history of Lawrence’s troubles with censorship, Read more …

Without question, the most unusual books D. H. Lawrence ever produced were his two “psychological” works: Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and, especially, Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). These texts are absolutely crucial for understanding Lawrence, for in them he sets forth an entire philosophy.

Many people consider F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: Song of Two Humans (1927) to be the greatest film of the silent era. But most are unaware that it was remade under Hitler as Die Reise nach Tilsit (1939), and directed by the notorious Veit Harlan.

Both films were based upon a novella – titled Die Reise nach Tilsit (The Journey to Tilsit) – by Hermann Sudermann. Read more …

“A man and a woman are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird are one.” Carl Jung was apparently besotted with this stanza from Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Read more …